Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday
that the law that allows full-time yeshiva students to defer army service is
unconstitutional. The Knesset will not be able to renew it in its present form.

In theory, the ruling should require the state
to draft around 62,000 yeshiva students and ultra-Orthodox youths this August,
on top of 7,000 yeshiva students who serve according to the Tal Law’s
stipulations.

But a more likely scenario is that the ruling will force the
Knesset to recraft the law, or the Defense Ministry will offer a new deal to
Haredi men.

In any case, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition may be
rocked by the ruling.

The Tel
Aviv city council’s request for approval for public transportation on Shabbat
is correct and courageous.

Residents of greater Tel Aviv deserve this basic
service. The argument that providing public transportation on the Sabbath and
holidays would harm the religious status quo is an exaggeration and unfair.

If a poll were conducted, the vast majority of
Tel Aviv’s residents would probably vote in favor of public transportation on
Shabbat.

A nationwide poll
conducted in 2010 by the Smith Institute for Hiddush, an organization fighting
for separation of state and religion, found that 63 percent of Israelis favored
public transportation on Shabbat, including 93% of secular Israelis.

Nevertheless,
permitting public transportation in Tel Aviv – dubbed “the first Hebrew city” –
would mark a deviation from tradition as enshrined in the status quo.

Lau said he was filled with a deep sense of
"pain and disappointment" upon learning of the decision and called on
Huldai to follow in the footsteps of past mayors who "did not allow the
candle of Shabbat to burn out."

Deputy Mayor Asaf Zamir: "Driving is
permitted on the Sabbath so the only people who are affected by the lack of
buses are those who don't own cars and find themselves confined to their homes
on Shabbat," Zamir said, two days after the Tel Aviv City Council voted
13-7 to ask the Transportation Ministry for permission to operate public
transport systems on Shabbat.

The Tzohar national-religious rabbinical
association also called on the municipality to refrain from damaging Israel’s
Jewish character without a broad public debate.

“Because we live together, and the importance of
maintaining the state's Jewish character, I believe that any decision that
affects all residents – religious and secular – needs to be made through public
discussion and consensus rather than unilateral action,” said Tzohar chairman
Rabbi David Stav.

Rabbi Uri Regev, director of the Hiddush
religious freedom lobbying group, said the transportation minister should “respond
to the will of the public, and not surrender to pressure from the haredi
[political] parties.”

The
proposal to allow public transportation to operate in the city on Shabbat,
approved on Monday by the Tel Aviv city council, was hedged so highly with
qualifiers that buses are unlikely to leave their garage on Friday evening and
Saturday.

Ultra-Orthodox politicians refused to be
daunted Tuesday by the Tel Aviv city council’s resolution to sanction buses on
Shabbat, saying the move would be defeated soon enough.

Deputy Mayor Naftali Lubert ‏(United Torah Judaism‏)
called the decision “cheap, Meretz spin,” referring to the left-wing party. He
said he couldn’t be bothered to threaten to leave the city coalition.

Leaving
the numbers aside for a moment, here are some possible conclusions and
speculations that can be entertained in light of this new data:

1. If
you’re one of those panicked over the strengthening of the Israeli Haredi community,
you might want to reconsider.

2. If
you’re a Conservative or a Reform leader, tired of hearing that these streams
have no way of succeeding in Israel – here’s your window of opportunity, opened
wide.

3.
Commitment does matter, a lot. Having many self-defined Conservative and Reform
Israelis is probably nice, but it will not be truly important if the number of
practicing Conservative and Reform Israelis doesn’t significantly grow.

4. The old
formula of dividing Israelis into “religious” and “secular” with some
“traditionalists” in the middle is losing relevance. There’s a center of
moderates. An important silent center of moderates that needs to be heard.
Variations are many, but old clichés are hard to die.

The author is a
Knesset member, an ordained rabbi and the founder and chairman of the Am Shalem
movement. www.amshalem.org/en/

Today’s
Chief Rabbinate is under the strong influence of extreme and anti-Zionist
organizations and political parties that act with animosity instead of love, as
if it were created to provide people with religious burdens instead of
religious services.

This
approach is foreign to the Jewish tradition passed to us from community rabbis
throughout the generations, including the original chief rabbis of Israel. They
strove to demonstrate love to all Jews and tried to share the beauty of Judaism
with everyone.

...The time has come
for Israeli citizens to demand this radical shift, and I hope to lead the
charge toward this change in the next Knesset. When this transformation takes
place, it will change the face of Israel and Judaism worldwide, with the
restoration of unity and Jewish and Zionist pride.

Ariel
Beery is the co-founder and co-director of the PresenTense Group

[We] need to transition from the current set of
Rabbinical institutions — which sow the seeds of hatred and division — into a
new set of institutions that strengthen the connection between the People of
Israel and the Tradition of Israel.

The most promising
proposal I have heard focuses on the recognition of the local character of
tradition that already exists, and strengthening that localization by devolving
power to the municipalities and the people of Israel.

This proposal starts
with the assumption that the relationship between tradition and politics in
Israel will never be like that in the United States, in that the Jews were
always both a tradition and a people, maintaining both a religion and a polity.

Instead, the State
of Israel should learn from European states — and more particularly, and
ironically, the current system in Germany, where each individual is empowered
through their contributions to the State to determine who will oversee their
traditional affairs.

Speaking to an audience consisting mainly of
settlers, [IDF Chief Rabbi Rafi] Peretz defended the new IDF orders obliging
religious soldiers to take part in official ceremonies, even if they consist of
women singing.

The orders, which Peretz had participated in drafting, exempt
these soldiers from attending unofficial events, intended mostly for
entertainment.

[Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, head of the West Bank
Har Bracha yeshiva], who has been castigating Peretz for weeks over his
approach to religion in the IDF and even called for his resignation, said that
while he supports military service for religious men, "if there's a
halakhic [Jewish religious law] problem, they must refuse [to obey orders]."

"Religious
soldiers can't follow the halacha laws properly in the army. They are forced to
change their way of life. It's a problem for a God-fearing man to serve in the
IDF today. They tell him that commands come before his conscience," the
rabbi said.

Dozens of senior IDF officers,
air force pilots, and elite unit troops are getting that little extra spiritual
push that helps them get through the tough exercises and combat training: A
five minute daily phone-in Torah lesson via conference call.

Between the 7 men
standing with me in the men’s section of the Kotel and the men standing
behind the women’s section, Women of the Wall had over a minyan’s worth of male allies today.

I wonder just how
many other male allies we had at the Wall. I suspect that some of the strictly
dark dress I saw today could never give away how much sympathy towards the
Women of the Wall actually is felt by some of the quieter folks in the
men’s section.

Of all the
important facets of the current “Battle for Jerusalem,” this one speaks to me
the loudest, and it turns out that one of my original characters, City
Councilwoman Rachel Azaria, is right in the middle of it.

Rachel is
a Modern Orthodox Jew herself and has used her position on City Council to
oppose Haredi gender segregation practices to the detriment of her own career.

I recently
realized that not only is Rachel’s story a great metaphor for the larger story
of Jerusalem today, but it’s a story that speaks to women struggling for
equality everywhere.

Suddenly,
the film was not only about the battle of my protagonists, but my battle as a
Jewish woman, and one that I’ve been fighting since my Bat Mitzvah in an
Orthodox shul where girls weren’t allowed to daven with the Torah and were
relegated to leading Havdallah services.

Even as
Orthodox women take on clergy-like roles, the task of interpreting Jewish law
has long been the exclusive domain of men. But a new group called Beit Hillel
aims to bring down that barrier.

An
alliance of 120 Orthodox rabbis and 30 female religious scholars, Beit Hillel
was formed to counter the increasingly hard line that rabbis in the religious
Zionist community are taking against women in official religious roles.

The
group’s formation, in February, paves the way for Jewish legal positions
formulated by women to be issued under the names of leading Modern Orthodox
rabbis.

Book
Review: Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policy-making in
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Orthodox ResponsaBy David
Ellenson and Daniel Gordis Stanford University Press

And here lies a great irony.

Two non-Orthodox
scholars analyze the Orthodox legal tradition on conversion, in the hope that
showing how strongly it has been influenced by public-policy considerations
will aid those who seek to interpret Jewish law in a way that strengthens the
Jewish people.

But those Orthodox rabbis who currently make
decisions on conversion do not care what anyone outside Orthodoxy thinks, nor
do they acknowledge that extralegal considerations influence their own stand,
since they consider their restrictive rulings objective applications of the
law.

Dr. Alex
Sinclair is director of programs in Israel Education for the Jewish Theological
Seminary.

Rather
than seeing Israel education as a purely American issue, in which the role of
the American Jew is "to be impacted" by Israel, this new definition
envisions it as a dialogical enterprise, which will create opportunities for
American Jews and Israelis to influence and be influenced by each other.

The
Israel education agenda must evolve in the light of this understanding.

Stephen
Kuperberg is executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition

As it turns out,
Beinart was dead wrong: wrong in the facts, and wrong in the interpretation.

In
an interview in the Israel Campus Beat, Leonard Saxe, who directs the Steinhardt
Social Research Institute and Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at
Brandeis University, called Beinart “an ignorant consumer of research on
American Jewish attitudes to Israel,” adding — not for the first time — “The bottom line is that Beinart is wrong
about the facts.

His thesis of how politics drives American attachment is a
straw person, not sustained by evidence.”

Steven M. Cohen, research professor of Jewish
Social Policy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and director
of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner.

Accordingly, few Jews who are disturbed by
Israel can properly be seen as distant from Israel, let alone anti-Israel.

If
such were not the case, then we’d have to regard most of the writers for Ha’aretz
as distant from Israel … and even an occasional columnist for The Jerusalem
Post.

Rather, the distressed and disturbed, North American Jews who are
critical of Israeli leader and policies are actually very close to Israel, with
a good number having spent long periods in Israel on Masa-sponsored programs
over the years.

Roman's
presentation was one of scores delivered by representatives of Israel's
immigrant community, on a day when the Knesset devoted a series of hearings to
elicit views of Israel's contentious legislative body and the efficacy of its
parliamentary system.

A class of 33 eighth
grade students from Hebrew University High School (Leyada) in Jerusalem greeted
the oldest couple to make aliyah in the history of Israel earlier this month.

The Israeli students,
aged thirteen to fourteen years old; many with parents or grandparents who
happened to have made aliyah, have spent the past two months studying aliyah in
a special class project about olim from the early stages of the Yishuv to
modern day Israel.

The morning meeting
was notable on several fronts, including the recognition by many of the
speakers of the “elephant in the room” as related to recent media criticism of
JAFI. In fact, in his opening remarks, Natan Sharansky – JAFI’s chair of the
executive – addressed the issue head on by stating “the Jewish Agency is
about Aliyah.”

Turning around recent media stories, Sharansky added, “as to the
articles in the press about our strategic plan, I’m glad people are finally
paying attention!”

Taglit-Birthright
Israel has contributed more than NIS 2 billion to the Israeli economy since its
inception in 2000, the organization said Sunday in an announcement timed to
coincide with the peak of its winter season.

Noble Energy Inc. yesterday announced that it has joined the Jewish Agency Youth Futures program, which supports disadvantaged children and children at
risk in Israel's periphery. Noble Energy's $2 million donation targets programs
in four towns: Beersheva, Ofakim, Lod, and Safed.

In a show of continued support of religious
diversity in Israel, the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago has made
$332,000 in grants for 2012, to fund six new and 10 ongoing programs within
Israel's liberal and transdenominational religious movements.

Of the total, Progressive (Reform) movement
programs will receive $110,000; Conservative movement programs - split between
the Masorti movement and the Schechter Institute - will receive $116,000; and
Modern Orthodox and Transdenominational programs will receive $106,000.

With
Galia, it was Judaism that entered the ideological vacuum that was created.
"I was at the commune and we were counselors at the seminars on Zionism
and Judaism," Galia recalls. "That was where we met the counselors
from the Reform Movement. I visited Lotan, the Reform movement's kibbutz in the
Arava, and I made connections with people there."

...In the meantime, I did my rabbinical studies
at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem."

Since being ordained in 2003, she has been the
rabbi at Beit Daniel in Tel Aviv. She is responsible for the congregation's 200
families, she conducts marriage ceremonies and bar mitzvahs, does conversions
and is in charge of the Reform Movement's rabbinical council in Israel.